Last weekend I got to see these guys. They were incredible.
I’ve been wanting to try OpenCV for a while. I did some Computer Vision work back in Uni and had a great time at it, and recently realised I had a cool fun project I could do to save me some time.
If you ever played TCGs (Trading Card Games), you know collections quickly become unmanageable, taking hours on end of inventory tracking if you’re serious about it. In my case, when I was playing TCGs here in Sydney (mostly MtG), I had the discipline to type in every new card, but every now and then at a big tournament I’d lose track of what was in. As the new cards piled up, the time it takes to type them in increased so much I gave up. I also stopped playing a while back, but that box is still there, rotting away.
One of the uses for that big box I have in my closet is that it can be sold—most of the cards I own are worth money. But if I am to sell them off, I need an inventory first. Hence this project.
Typing in a card name takes me about half a minute, but the strain is the worst. Typing is exhausting. So instead I coded a detector in python that grabs the card name and puts it in the clipboard or an output file while making a rewarding ‘beep’ sound (kid you not, I love that feature so much it’s on by default). Here is the detector running in clipboard mode. As it is now, it takes about 12s to detect a card, the minimum I’ve seen was about 3s and there is no maximum (it can sit there until it figures it out).
The principle is simple: instead of trying to find out where the card is, it shows the user where it is looking. Once the user puts the card in the right place, it will attempt to figure out which card it is.
I tried other OCR ideas, like training Tesseract with the MtG font and card names. After all that, I decided to keep it simple and go with the default Tesseract detector with only a-zA-Z characters. This way card names are just a single word with no spaces. From there, I use the Hunspell spell checker with a custom dictionary to spell check these ‘words’ and give me the most likely candidate. Once the system is confident enough that it found a match, it will output data in whichever format was selected.
The results are incredibly good (and fast) considering my rig is a $10 Kmart cam, a jar, some wire and a white sheet of paper. One of the cool things I’ll be looking into is how to make a nicer rig that has a ‘place’ for the card, so I can drop it straight in and it will be properly lit and in the right detection place. Maybe once my Peachy Printer arrives I can add some OpenSCAD to the project.
My scanning setup
The GPLv3 source code is up on my GitHub. It is true, I finally gave up and joined GitHub until I can run my own git server (which, depending on my budget, may or may not be soon). This is my first ‘official’ public open source project!
Generally I’m not too keen on putting commercial products on this page, but in this case I thought it would be fun.
For a while now I’ve been playing with the idea of using 3D printing tech to make instruments. My 3D printer is still being built (I supported the peachy printer), but I also supported the 3Doodler, which I finally got in the mail.
For a start, it isn’t an easy thing to use. It will take me a while to figure it out. I realised the reason why everything looks so ‘doodly’ is because the plastic coming out of the pen twists itself, which means the output is hard to control. Either way, I decided to have a go at something useful.
For a while now I’ve been playing my Technopipes with headphones or the occasional PA, but one of the things I miss is having the feeling of an acoustic instrument—it makes it easier for me to pick up tunes by ear while they’re playing. I tried having only one headphone on and I couldn’t do it as well. So I decided to buy a cheap portable speaker (the pink one was on special at KMart, cost me $5 so I bought 3 and played around with them).
Once that was sorted, I doodled a nice stand, so check the video out! It’s a pretty hilarious instrument. Good fun to carry on trips.
While we’re on the topic of 3D, just for fun—here is an experiment on making a parametric model of a wind instrument. I made it based on Linsey Pollak’s foonki. The UI is just OpenSCAD and GVim. Once the printer is in, I might have these projects up more often. Here is a copy of that .scad file.
I had another equally amusing title for this post: ‘infatuated with bullies’. By now it should be no secret that I’m highly critical of the way the Anglo Aussies organise themselves and interact with each other. I’d like to address the strange fetishisation of The Bully in Australia, which I think has parallels in many other ‘civilised’ cultures.
Why is it that we idolise bullies so much? Say Wallace vs. Darwin or Stallman vs. Gates, where the latter is the bully version in the same field of knowledge.
Let me begin with the usual disclaimer: I will generalise a lot based on what I’ve observed here but that is entirely conditioned by the fact that I live in Sydney, more specifically, the super white, bohemian and cosmopolitan inner west. The section of the city I interact with is predominately well off and with that comes one of the great diseases of civilisation: politeness. Let me explain.
From a young age, depending on the parenting, most Anglo parents will teach their children to ‘not say anything if they have nothing nice to say’. Now what should they do when they need to say something that isn’t nice, as it so frequently happens? They lie. The civilised and the polite are experts in the art of euphemisms and white lies—to the extreme of perceiving an honest opinion as brutish and impolite. But if everyone is nice to one another, what happens if one of them isn’t? What happens when in a group of very nice and polite people there is a single person that has no problem in being aggressive in their opinions towards others? Their bullying ends up enabled by the politeness around them.
Consider someone with an unpopular opinion surrounded by nice people. The more passionate and aggressive they are at explaining their idea, more likely it is that the polite people will remove themselves from the situation because they have ‘nothing nice to say’. This effectively guarantees that the aggressive opinion will alienate anyone that could be critical of it but wants no part in it. The fear of speaking up against an aggressive individual is so strong that even just raising one’s own voice or being taller than average might be enough to get support when we’re wrong.
One of the curious things that I faced when moving here was that suddenly I was no longer of average or above average height (back home). Even though I’m still 1,82m, here in Australia most people around me are taller and heavier in build. This means that suddenly I’m faced with what I was doing back home: expressing opinions while being physically intimidating and accidentally getting confirmation not because I was right, but exactly because I was intimidating. And now that I’m not a big guy any more, I actually have to back up my arguments.
I think we can find the best examples of this in politics, where being convincing, charismatic, having a deep voice, being tall and good looking actually increases the odds the argument gets agreed with, even if it’s wrong.
In a culture of submission to etiquette and politeness, the few that don’t care and decide to bully others around them will thrive tremendously, and their success will be fed by the masses of submitted individuals that, with fear of retribution from others, end up supporting the bully against their will.
I like to think that this comes from a very basic fear of personal health and well-being. If the bully is bigger than us, then we’d lose the fight, so best not even try. If the people around us are going in one direction, best not stir the water too much or we’ll be in trouble. This has an amplifying effect and makes intimidating people into accidental leaders, not because they’re right, but because they have the capacity of instilling fear and intimidation (not all leaders are like this, obviously). Take the recently elected, former boxer, Tony Abbott. If you watch a debate with him, he kept his boxer face. He might be saying the most atrocious barbarities and downright ignorant lies, but since the boxer face tells everyone around them that his opinions are backed up by other ‘convincing arguments’, then many will simply agree out of fear of the consequences (one of the know long-term consequences of boxing is brain damage due to concussion—related to things like loss of empathy; a nice coincidence?)
Now, the consequences aren’t real at all, but since we live in a world where physical violence is virtually non-existent, our reactions are never calibrated to real physical violence, so even an intimidating stare, waving arms or screaming might make us cower. It might trigger responses in us designed to much more dangerous environments, but since we’ve been so cushioned, even a flat concrete floor will feel painful.
I’d argue that this is one of the things that makes us on one hand be so complacent with corruption and violence around us, and so infatuated with people that are capable of ‘taking what they want’. It is a form of envy, in that we are constrained by politeness and social etiquette to the point that we long for the day we can tell someone to ‘fuck off’. Now, Australia isn’t that bad if you’re dealing with working class Aussies—they will tell you to ‘fuck off’. But the higher up you go in socio-economic ladder, the more likely it is that these rituals and constraints are stronger, and with them, so will be the fetishisation of violence and the idolatry of the Bully.
What is so special about the Anglo world that makes this so blatant? I think it’s the century old hatred and fear for the ‘man in the street’ that Anglo philosophy has instilled in its populace for centuries. Think Hobbes, think Welles. The idea that people are nasty and brutish is a very old and popular idea in the Anglo world and has never been brought down by any popular revolution. The Hobbesian pyramid of human beings is as healthy today as it was 200 years ago when the British Empire thrived thanks to genocide and theft. The Anglo empire has never fallen at the hands of the proletariat. The idea of the Emperor taking control of the world has never been exposed for how violent it really is. Even after the American revolution, the counter revolution quickly took hold and the bourgeois of the old world regained control of it. There is no single Anglo country or colony where the ideals of the American (and French) revolution lasted long enough to show an alternative. Even worse, the 20th century saw a deliberate imperial control (and undermining) of alternatives to this way of thinking.
The idea that a world of solidarity and peace is possible, an old idea that opposed the Hobbesian view (ideas of people like Rousseau or one of my recent favourites, Kropotkin). The revolutionary forces based on these ideals have had very few opportunities to show results of their policies—the places where alternatives to the bully culture worked were destroyed by, you got it, international bullies like the CIA.
So what alternatives exist to this world view? For me, the idea of virtue as the capacity to face overwhelming forces of Imperialism (and its cousin, Capitalism) through generosity, solidarity and, above all, honesty in one’s own relationship to others—a commitment to truth, is a viable means to act.
It starts with not being complicit with abuses—by speaking out, by dissenting, by making your voice heard (think leaking documents and exposing corruption). I am not saying this is a large scale solution, quite the contrary. This is something that needs to be done at every moment at the lowest levels possible, because it is at this level that the unhealthy patterns are created. If we are to create viable alternatives, they need to begin with our own lifestyles and relationships. What we buy, what we do, how we treat others, who we sell our labour to and for how much.
If we are peasants, it is unlikely that anything more than that will ever be accessible to us. Despite usually disagreeing with the new age ‘be the change’ type argument (think Hitler, he also tried to ‘be the change’), I think it is important to gauge one’s own action by one’s own capacities. If we are poor, we must start with our own subsistence, resilience and the well being of our kin. In a way, it is not very wise to pick a battle we can’t win on our own or with our tiny social capital. Until it grows it is best to save our energy.
If we are bourgeois, then a few more things might be there for us. Power and influence only corrupt if somewhere along the way that commitment is lost and turns into entitlement. There is nothing stopping a millionaire from living on minimum wage and putting their money where their politics is—except for their own distorted reality bubble where they are worth every penny. I make a higher than average salary, which puts me dead smack in the bourgeois category, but I take a chunk of it out and live with the rest. That money can go anywhere and be used for any kind of cooperative activity. But what do the leftists with money do? They keep their money as close to them as the capitalists they hate.
Beyond this simple analysis of the Bully in the Anglo world, as I’ve been diving deeper into martial arts and philosophy, I realised something about bullies, aggressors and violence in general. Allow me the eccentricity of making a classically styled argument against violence.
Are the aggressors stronger than their victims? Then they are cowards.
Are the aggressors weaker than their victims? Then they are foolish.
Are the aggressors on par with their victims? Then the result will amount to little more than luck.
None of these outcomes puts the aggressors in a good light.
If we idealise and glorify the strong that prey on the weak, we rig the very society we live in against us, not just because it is unlikely that we’ll ever be on the strong side (think having armies and endless resources), but also because we don’t all begin from the same starting position in life. Like playing monopoly where one player starts with 99% of the money and the others divide the rest—we don’t come into this world with equal challenges and privileges, and we certainly don’t choose to be the weaker party.
Isn’t it the greatest bravery of all to dare stand up and defend ourselves from those that oppress us, even if it might seem deluded at times? Isn’t it much more inspiring to defy these overwhelming forces—like flowers cracking concrete?
First, a tune and an apology for the silence on this page. For the past year I have been writing a book — the book that was promised years ago. It is now in the editing phase and will be out in the coming months. Since my writing efforts were focused there, I ended up not writing much here at all.
One of my recent lifestyle changes was to start attending Irish music sessions. A music session is basically a rehearsal in a pub or venue: a bunch of traditional musicians get together and practise tunes they know. While this is the main historical background story of these happenings, in practice, sessions are more fun than gigs because there is no official audience and no official performers. There is also mostly no original repertoire: it is all from the vast troves of public domain music available. And when a tune isn’t public domain? Well, you steal it.
Back in the days when recorded music was for a small select group of elite musicians, folk musicians had no other option but to learn by ear and follow an oral tradition of transmission. Bagpipers in Portugal were no exception, in that if they liked a bagpiper’s style or tune, they’d hear it and copy it and start playing it themselves. Piracy isn’t new — it’s as old as our capacity to communicate and to understand.
These pipers had a fundamental community purpose: they were the DJs and entertainers of their time. They played for dance halls for the sole purpose of making dances and festivities more enjoyable. The music itself always served the practical purpose of feeding the party, instead of any other particular high aesthetic (with exceptions, maybe, for airs and religious themes).
Whenever a particular tune was a hit among crowds, that meant more money for the pipers. It is no surprise, then, that most pipers took issue on teaching how to play pipes — if they couldn’t control the tunes themselves, they had to control the medium to prevent competition from other pipers.
Times have changed for folk musicians, but not too much. One of the things that has changed is the fact that the quantity of folk music that has been written down and documented and published as public domain is tremendous — more than any single musician could ever remember and play in a lifetime. This has an interesting side effect in the folk music scenes: authorship is a curiosity about a tune, not the main point. The main point, instead, becomes the interpretation and performance aspects of the tunes themselves: the interpreter effectively brings the public domain material to life. Learning and mastering the art itself becomes the main focus of the artists, and the tunes vehicles to express their creativity.
Traditional artists that record their own tunes quite often let their friends play them at sessions — authorship respected, playing with fellow musicians dissolves the economic interests that might have mediated their interactions with others.
This, to me, is one of the incredibly powerful ideas that comes from the folk scenes: music isn’t theirs to begin with, but that is accepted as part of a tradition, even when the tunes themselves are less than 50 years old and would therefore fall under copyright laws. In folk music, ownership of a tune is meaningless. It either is a hit for dancers and fellow session musicians, or it isn’t, and the way that success is measured includes how many other musicians like your tunes and decided to cover them (or better put, copy them and modify them).
While the way traditional music is studied and passed on has this interesting characteristic in regards to intellectual property, it also has another interesting idea in what a performance really is.
Here in Sydney the art scenes are ripe with “Look at me” type events where everyone has a shot at the stage, yet doesn’t watch what others do there. Be it an exhibition where the exhibitor doesn’t see anyone else’s work, or the gig where the band leaves early and doesn’t watch others play, the idea of stage and performance is fundamentally different to the one represented by sessions and dance halls.
In a session, musicians are rehearsing and having fun together, collectively exploring and practising tunes they don’t own and most likely didn’t write. There is usually no stage, and the venue is usually a pub where most people are interested in the big screens with matches than the music. The music in these places isn’t a commodity — it’s a collective experience. While a gig represents a ritualistic relationship between the musician and the audience, a session breaks that down and turns music it into an every day thing we do with our friends and acquaintances.
Like jam sessions, DJs mixing for a live audience, jazz dance halls, it is in the commoner’s world that music is alive — prevented from being merchandise simply because it is a vehicle for a communal experience. And while the congregation spaces where this happens might shift over time, the idea remains that we prefer art to be free to interpret and modify, since that serves the public enjoyment of that very same art. If property is an idea of alienation, then folk music is a perfect example of the opposite: how creativity persists and is enhanced by the absence of property, and how it creates bridges between people and communities that thrive.
That is why I abandoned most other music scenes and moved to folk music — it is where I find this rich balance of creativity, community spirit and a surprising lack of self-commodification persists and thrives. And in such an alienating world, it is a great source of fresh (moving) air.
There is something to be said about economic crimes and their perpetrators — they are virtually ignored in how serious they can be. In a worldwide ever-spreading austerity it is important to keep in mind what causes what, and how a seemingly innocent economic policy can have real world devastating effects. Though there are many such effects, I’d like to address xenophobia in particular, with its allied concept multiculturalism.
The signs are growing and clearer than ever. Golden Dawn party in Greece, riots in Sweden and violence in England. France’s seemingly ethnically driven riots a few years ago were almost like a warning. Meanwhile, news propagate the religious and ethnic logic instead of the actual economic causes. A clash of civilisations, of peoples, of religions or even of inborn intellectual capacities. Poorer countries and cultures are written off as lazy and incapable by nature. An interesting article in a tabloid read “White vs. Islamic culture”, as if religion and ethnicity were even comparable. Cui bono? Who exactly benefits from this ideology? What exactly is it saying?
While it may be clear in the literature that austerity and inequality lead to the root causes of riots and xenophobia, and that hegemonic states lead to violence between their own citizens, these are largely hard to understand because they require a depth of understanding of social processes not generally available to the public. So we buy into the “multiculturalism failed” and “islam as a bad influence on society”, when what we should be reading is “economic policies cause riots” and “economists responsible for crimes against humanity”. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.
When living at SPCC I ran into a symptomatic situation involving xenophobia and poverty. One of our residents, let’s call him X, was a first generation Portuguese citizen with Muslim and African parents. Needless to say his family struggled but gave him a hard working ethics, which he followed sporadically. X was a street punk and enjoyed his drugs and alcohol, so he’d get odd construction jobs while living with us. During that same time, we also had to illegal migrant residents. Since for the most part we lived in a state of surplus, all residents got along fairly well. But when food wasn’t enough or some would put in more work than others, the arguments would start.
Note that since in certain surplus moments things were okay (meaning, food, energy, drinks, leisure weren’t an issue), and in moments of scarcity they weren’t, and since the people were the same, it was this “micro-economic” state of our community that was determining the changes in interactions and behaviour. Frequently I’d do a shop run for food just to prevent arguments. X was generally a positive and happy member of our community. The interesting thing was when our “micro-economy” would go in the red (not enough food, not enough working hands). X would turn to the migrants and say “Go get a job! Go back to your country! Fucking (ethnicity) not wanting to work!” X’s poor understanding of politics and economics meant he had no real way of rationalising his frustrations. The frustrations themselves were justified: there he was, a working class 1st generation citizen working his ass off for some beer, and there they were, the illegal migrants at our squat not wanting to contribute and living off our community for free. This is a political issue within the community, but since they also had an external characteristic (their ethnicity), that characteristic became part of the rationalisation and with it made X into a xenophobe. X, the black muslim descendant in a white catholic portugal was being xenophobic towards migrants. This, to me, was a profound contradiction but spelled out nothing more than that xenophobia, racism or even islamophobia are simply symptoms of socio-economic forces that create these tensions.
SPCC was a clear example of multiculturalism. We had hundreds of nationalities over, frequently 5 or more cultures interacting with each other and no conflicts in general, unless there was an economic issue with the community. X’s xenophobia is like the waves of xenophobia and islamophobia that we can expect only to get worse in the coming years. They express legitimate frustrations of working class people that have no other way of articulating their problems than the simplified we/them black/white catholic/muslim false dichotomies.
The media, whose job it is to inform and provide meaningful rationalisations to the public, does so according to an agenda that benefits the ruling class (generally white and judeo-christian), and therefore provides bogus rationalisations instead. “Multiculturalism failed” is going to be the catchphrase for the coming social turmoil of a disenfranchised generation. Meanwhile, the policies and policy makers that are responsible for it failing can walk away freely, since this logic protects them and instead blames the very people that are victimised by these policies. If it’s multiculturalism that failed, then it isn’t austerity and bad economic policies that failed, and economic crime can continue unpunished. If Islam and Christianity are incompatible, then it isn’t the bad integration policies and cultural education in schools. If black people are dumber than white people, then it isn’t that white people have enslaved and oppressed these minorities into submission. Clearly these phrases are terrifying, but they are the logic behind these news. Sadly, I fear that we will see more of this as inequality and austerity extend further and further.
In the light of this, I stick to what I know. Power determines behaviour and social unrest is a symptom of the incompetence and corruption of those in power. Whenever anyone in power attributes social problems to external factors, beware.
Perhaps on topic, perhaps not, but a classic nonetheless.
